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A Damning Indictment Of Media's Tendency To Exploit, Not Explain

January 29, 1996|By Reviewed by Tim Jones, Tribune Media Writer.

Breaking the News:

How the Media Undermine American Democracy

By James Fallows

Pantheon, 296 pages, $23

It has become almost as fashionable to rip the news media as it is to savage lawyers, doctors, politicians, big government and the cable-TV repair person who never seems to show up. It is a neat fit in our era of victimization, when we can always find someone else to blame for our troubles.

But as James Fallows chronicles in his disturbingly thoughtful "Breaking the News," the criticism of the American news media is often richly deserved. The actions of the media, in fact, are one reason why citizens seem to quickly embrace cynicism, if not despair, about the complicated workings of our nation. Fallows has fashioned a powerful indictment of media more inclined toward exploitation than explanation, and pontificating rather than probing.

Fallows, the Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly, meticulously documents some of the more egregious examples of how the media are undermining their own credibility: the buck-raking by Washington reporters who travel the lucrative lecture loop created by some of the special interests they cover; the "pundicide" that occurs on buffoonish talk shows such as "The McLaughlin Group," on which reporters are paid handsomely to bloviate, provoke and entertain; and the widespread practice of trivializing the important and magnifying the trivial, or reducing important issues of public policy to the status of sports-page journalism.

"The view of public life that comes through today's press is, finally, less like the Super Bowl, or the World Series, or the Olympics than another sporting enterprise: pro wrestling. To judge by the coverage, everything is a sham," Fallows writes. "Conflicts are built up and then they blow over, and no one is sincere. As onlookers we can laugh at and look down at the participants, because everyone knows it's all done for effect."

"We have a system of news that tells people constantly that the world is out of control, that they will always be governed by crooks, that their fellow citizens are about to kill them."

What is too often missing in daily reporting--especially on television--is a sense of context, the connecting points that explain the broader relevance of an event. This is perhaps the most compelling argument in the book because it highlights the "if-it-bleeds-it-leads" mentality of television news and the chronic attention-deficit syndrome that afflicts much of the media.

A prime example of this occurred in June 1994, when, for a short while, the media focus was on North Korea's refusal to open its nuclear plants to international inspection. There was tough talk of military retaliation against the North Koreans. But the issue soon plummeted from the media heights on the day of the slow-speed chase on the Santa Monica freeway.

"When did you know that the moment of crisis had passed?" a South Korean diplomat was asked in 1994. "It was when the O.J. Simpson car chase began," he replied. "As soon as the American media had O.J. to deal with, you could feel the weight of CNN and the American pundits come off our shoulders."

As soon as the Clinton health-care proposal, which itself was trivialized to campaign-level reporting, was declared politically dead, major coverage of one of the most important issues of this decade practically disappeared under the disjointed and hyped-up barrage of news regarding O.J., crime, layoffs, civil war and assorted tragedies and depravities. Little wonder some people choose to skip the TV news before turning in at night.

"Journalists are taught the pat theory that since `news' means events out of the ordinary, all the non-disastrous things that happen each day are not their business to report. Within limits this is true--a shooting at a school is news, the absence of a shooting is not. But if an awareness of the parts of life that go right is not built into an enumeration of what is going wrong, the news becomes fundamentally useless, in that it teaches us all to despair," Fallows said.

"For journalism to matter, it must be useful in one particular way. It must give people the sense that life is not just a sequence of random occurrences," Fallows said.

"This, unfortunately, is the press' area of most grievous failure. The message of today's news coverage is often that the world cannot be understood, shaped or controlled, but merely endured or held at arm's length."

This is no media conspiracy, as some might like to think. It's simply a combination of arrogance, laziness, ego, personal and corporate greed, a mind-numbing lack of editorial imagination and an absence of courage to break from the journalistic pack--all of which Fallows details with devastating force.